We have adopted Compulsion, become a militarist Power! Melancholy
consummation; but for the period of the war it was always, I think, a
foregone conclusion. What is to happen after? How is national security
to be guaranteed without permanent surrender to militarism?
Assuming that attention will be paid to retaining due command at sea and
in the air, what further will be necessary to fit us for our part in a
League for Peace if it comes, or, if it does not come, to make us safe?
There will here be put forward in roughest outline a notion—long in the
writer’s mind, but for which there has seemed hitherto little chance of
serious consideration—with the plea that there is really no alternative
solution commensurate with the need for being thoroughly prepared, no
other adequate way, in fact, out of a dilemma, short of retaining a
measure of Continental militarism, repugnant to our traditions, and
ruinously costly to a people in our position.
Put with the utmost brevity it is this: That all boys between the ages
of fourteen and eighteen, not then at school, shall pass four months
yearly in camps, which shall give them continuation schooling so far as
practicable, technical education in the craft, trade, or occupation for
which the boy is most suited or intends to adopt, together with training
in all the essentials of a soldier’s life. At the close of their fourth
training the boys should be affiliated to Territorial regiments, and
pass at once to one definite period of military service, from three to
six months, as may be necessary to convert them into potential soldiers;
and that, from that point on, we should rely, as hitherto, on purely
voluntary service. From such a nucleus a really efficient Territorial
force of at least a million could probably be enrolled, and the skeleton
of a much larger force kept in being.
The scheme is admittedly heroic, but it could be as gingerly introduced
as seemed good to more practical men than is this writer.
There are in England, Scotland, and Wales some 1,500,000 boys between
the ages of fourteen and eighteen; there are eight months in the year
when such education and training could be carried on. There will be an
infinity of camps in being before the war is over. And however unsuited
these camps may be at the moment for combining technical instruction
with military training, many of them could undoubtedly be adapted. The
chance of so much suitable material at hand, so much organizing
capacity, and so much sense of awakened public spirit and necessity,
will never come again. Some plan more or less heroic has got to be
adopted, and it is submitted that no other could possibly kill so many
birds with one stone. For, to the writer this proposal is even more
important in relation to the menace from within than in relation to the
menace from without.
The worst feature of our social scheme at present—the most dangerous
flaw in the machine—is the waste, the absolute throwing away of the
years between fourteen and eighteen, the most important period of the
male life (and, for that matter, of the female life), the years when
physique and character are forming when the instrument is malleable;
years for the most part now left to chance and to blind-alley
occupations. If we want to be a strong and healthy nation, this is the
weakness of all others to overcome. The following is taken from the
introduction to Mr. Arnold Freeman’s intimate and careful book: “Boy
Life and Labour”:—
“What we need to consider is not the sacrifice of a certain
number of youths through faulty industrial arrangements, _but
the lack of training and the manufacture of inefficiency in the
majority of boys between school and manhood._
“At the present time it would seem to be the consensus of
opinion of school teachers, employers, and all those who are
intimate with the problem that great masses of boys are growing
up to manhood inefficient for adult work, and incapable of
performing the elementary duties of home life and citizenship.
The truer mode of regarding the problem may be illustrated by
the following quotation:
“‘According to the main statistical sources of information the
very serious fact emerges that between 70 and 80 per cent. of
the boys leaving elementary schools enter unskilled occupations.
Thus, even when the boy ultimately becomes apprenticed or enters
a skilled trade, those intervening years from the national point
of view are entirely wasted. Indeed the boy, naturally reacting
from the discipline to which school accustomed him, usually with
abundance of spare time not sufficiently utilized, and without
educative work, _is shaped during these years directly towards
evil_.’ (Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission, Part VI.,
Chap. VII.)”
Now, if the richer classes of this country could be brought face to face
with a sight of their own boys from fourteen to eighteen planted in this
morass that boys of the poorer classes have as a matter of course to
struggle through, they would marvel that the poorer classes have not
long ago demanded that it be drained. Working-class parents have not
demanded this chiefly because the boy from fourteen to eighteen has
meant so many scanty shillings in the family pocket. When shillings are
scarce one more or less seems vital. But, economically as well as
nationally speaking, such rotting-down of the boys is grievously
short-sighted. By this scheme, I believe, the working classes would be
the first to benefit, and, after a few years, the last to wish it given
up. Their ultimate gain would be incalculable, and, collectively
speaking, their immediate loss even would be small. One million five
hundred thousand boys training four months in the year means a seeming
withdrawal of one boy in three, or half a million boys annually, from
labour. But the number of boys between fourteen and eighteen actually
employed before the war was only 1,264,000, so that there would be
available some unemployed towards filling the places of the half million
withdrawn. In the withdrawal too, of so large a number of boys from the
labour market lies some chance of solving a problem that will begin to
loom as soon as Peace comes: How to find places for the women whom the
war has accustomed to work and wages? By this withdrawal, also, old and
unemployed men would benefit; we shall want all the help we can get to
minimize the unemployment that will sooner or later follow the war. So
far as the labour market is concerned, the problem, in fact, would be
mainly one of adjustment, but boys could be paired for their four years
of training, one taking the other’s job—boy A. working it eight months
the first and third years and four months the second and fourth year;
_vice versâ_ with boy B. A nation which has achieved in these last few
months such miracles of organization is surely equal to a task of
adjustment no harder of accomplishment than that which has long
confronted every militarist country in time of peace, and which may at
any moment confront this country, if it neglects adequate preparation
for home defence on some such lines.
Consider the life of the working man at present. The State provides him
as a boy with education up to the age of fourteen; provides him as a man
with labour exchanges, insurance, and old-age pensions. The one period,
which in the more fortunate ranks of Society is regarded as above all
preparatory for life, is the one period of which the State takes no
account. It is a fatal hole in the ballot. Why should not the workers
have the privilege for their sons that belongs by mere good fortune to
the wealthier classes—the privilege of a training that will give them
greater health, greater knowledge and technical skill, better habits,
more self-respect, and the power as well as the inclination to defend
their country if need be?
After this war the national readjustments that take place to meet the
menace from without and the menace from within must surely have relation
to fundamental necessities, and not merely be the top-dressing and
timorous expedients that accompany the piping times of a long-unshaken
peace.
In the expenditure of large sums to achieve its ends the State need not
look for its money back this year or next, so long as there is a
certainty of the money back manifold ten and twenty years hence.
The expense of a national scheme for the training and technical
education of all boys from fourteen to eighteen would have been looked
on before the war as an insuperable objection. But the truly wonderful
example of faith shown by the Russian Government in cutting off their
own colossal revenue from drink at the outbreak of the war, and the
immediate incalculable advantage to the strength of the Russian nation
that accrued thereby, has knocked penny-wisdom off its perch.
This is not the time or place, nor am I qualified to examine the cost in
detail. But, whatever that cost, can there be any doubt that the
increased physical and industrial efficiency, coupled with the national
security guaranteed by such training, would bring the outlay back
tenfold within a generation? And can there be any question that it would
conserve wealth, which adult training would but dissipate? When the war
is over there will be great numbers of men whose lives have been
hopelessly jolted, who have to find new occupations—men qualified, and
probably only too willing, to take positions of technical instruction
and military training under such a scheme. And the boys of the nation,
already infected with desire to stand for something in the national
security, would fall in with good spirit.
Apart from the question of expense, opposition would come, no doubt,
from the employers of boy labour, and from the working-class parents of
boys who are contributing to the family purse.
Both these objections can surely be met in the main by careful
organization and dovetailing of employment. Only half the boys would be
training at once; and for the winter months, of greatest stress for the
poorer classes, none would be training; boy-labour is not highly-skilled
labour, it is rarely of a nature that cannot equally well be supplied by
another boy, and, failing that, by women, or men past the prime of work.
With good-will and co-operation it should not surpass the wit either of
employers or of the officials of special Boy-Labour Exchanges to cope
with the dislocation. A boy’s earnings are not vast; when his own keep
has been paid there remain but few shillings for the family exchequer.
The value of these few shillings is in many cases, however, enormous;
the loss might be made good by some system of insurance. Nor is it
inconceivable that camp work would produce a small wage that could go to
the assistance of the boys’ families. Omelettes cannot be made without
breaking eggs; and, even if distress were caused at the start, can it be
seriously weighed against the great ultimate benefit to the working
classes, and the overwhelming advantages of rejuvenation in the blood
and brain of a whole nation? The war has shown what those who have had
to do with camp life for boys knew well before—the vast change that can
be made in the physique and bearing of young fellows by a few months of
fresh air and training. If those months are repeated yearly for four
years, the training combined with civil instruction, and followed by a
short spell of full military service, the country will have not only
potential soldiers, but real men and citizens, at the end.
This is interference with the liberty of the subject. Yes; but a boy is
only a boy. In the richer classes he is sent to school till he is
eighteen without any say whatever in his fate. And as to interference
with the liberty of the parents: Are they not now completely interfered
with, in reference to their children up to the age of fourteen; and is
there any sane reason why that interference should not be continued
partially, for the good of the boys, and of us all, up to the age of
eighteen?
The scheme is nothing but a form of militarism! Yes, but facts must be
faced. After the lesson of this war, its appalling suddenness, its
complete disregard of the law of nations, after the hatred it has evoked
and the burning for revenge it will leave, are we prepared to trust our
country and all that it stands for, to old-time methods and—luck? If
not what form of training can we have that will be less militarist than
this? To relapse into our unpreparedness is but to court the chances of
an attack, to shirk our share perhaps of duty under a League for Peace;
and to risk being forced into rank militarism, in one of those panics
certain to come freely after such a war.
If I thought such a scheme of boy-training would bolster up privilege,
foster a dangerous docility, put power into the hands of our Junkers,
and generally convert our country into a kind of Germany, I would shun
it like the devil. To keep boys of that age at it all the time would be
dangerous; to train them for civil and military life four months in the
year, with one short final period of military service—harmless. After
the war—perhaps not at once, but within a few years—there will almost
certainly be serious civil troubles, and any such scheme of boy training
would need to be inaugurated under the most solemn engagements not to
employ the youth of the nation in the quelling of strikes, civil riot,
or what-not. It would be for Labour to fix those guarantees before they
gave adherence to the plan. Having secured themselves, I believe they
might look forward to nothing but benefit, after the first rubs and
jolts.
Consider, too, that except under some such scheme there is practically
no chance of putting into practice another national dream—the
resettlement of the land. By attaching farm lands to those camps, town
boys could be instructed in the difficult work of modern agriculture.
Farm workers do not grow on thorn-trees, or even spring full-fledged
from the brains of ardent reformers. They are made, not born, and made
in youth. It is time to begin making them, if indeed it is not already
too late. No adequate land scheme will flourish without machinery on a
large scale for educating boys in modern farm work.
But there is another aspect of this matter worth more than passing
attention. If the war ends victoriously, Great Britain will bulk very
large, dangerously large, in the eyes of the world. The German cry is:
“Great Britain is the tyrant; the Fleet of England is the menace,
threatening every country!” No effort will be left untried to din that
whisper into every ear, to implant that suspicion in every mind. To
escape the world’s jealousy will not be possible. And, if in addition to
a dominant Fleet, and possibly a dominant air service, we preserve
militarism on the present Continental lines, we shall excite—whatever
the peaceful nature of our conduct and intentions—the most profound
uneasiness and envy in quarters where we most wish to be regarded with
perfect equanimity. On the one hand, then, we have the danger of
relapsing into a state of unpreparedness that may provoke another war;
on the other, the danger of rousing too great fear and envy by an
ostentatious strength, and of increasing a burden of armament already
too heavy on our shoulders. Between these dangers lies a path of safety
in the training of our boys. But there lies much more than that. There
lies the grander social future of our country—an incalculable physical,
moral and economic uplifting, a nation more self-reliant and more eager,
purged of that don’t-care look, of the town blight which was settling on
it fast—there is no nation suffering from town life to anything like
the extent to which we suffer from it. Just now the war has lifted that
blight; but with peace it will come down again, unless we fight it.
Is this lamely outlined plan a mere dream, or is it a possible, nay, a
probable, measure, in times big with chances—in times such as we may
never have again, for tuning up our life, for equalizing fortune,
removing foul places, and essential weakness?
With the suggestion that it is worth thinking over, at any rate, the
writer leaves the answer to those less fatuous than himself.